RELIGION MUST REASON AND DISCARD FAITH

Holding any individual as infallible is fundamentally flawed. His ideas and utterances must be tested for their veracity even as scientific propositions are. The same rigour of reasoning needs to apply in religion as in science and the principles enunciated cannot be held as sacrosanct beyond scepticism and query. There is nothing venerable in science whose pursuit is strictly objective and in its adherence to the unabashed discovery of truth lies its sanctity of spirit. It modifies models that attempt the description of natural truth in human linguistic and mathematical terms as and how flaws in existing hypotheses or even erstwhile accepted laws or theories are detected. Science does not consider such modification or rejection of past principles heretical and welcomes research into truth for the uncovering of its essence closer than ever before. And this honest addressing of the natural question advances its cause as it forays into uncharted territory using what I would say truly spiritual principles of enquiry, discipline, rational rigour and intellectual honesty. Thus, the cause of science, vibrant and dynamic, is served better than any religious cause, rotting since inception in its stagnant adherence to prophetic pronouncement, unaltered and unalterable, for, after all, they are the Word of God, inviolable and unerring. Such stagnancy inevitably plays upon the darker facets of the human mind and seeks its coarser corrupting elements to subsist and to thrive, gaining its mandate to undermine civilisation through the gathering of numbers and not garnering of fact and ever feeling threatened in its survival when confronted by the basic questions of human rational thinking.

The religions of Abrahamic tradition arising in West Asia are all dogmatic and doctrinaire. They are based on arbitrary assumptions of faith imposed upon the multitude of their adherents by prophetic pronouncement, unverified and unverifiable, which stand in direct contradiction to the rational deductions of science. On the contrary, ages ago in India, our sages discovered spiritual principles in much the same manner as modern scientists apply in their search for natural truth except for the fact that the direction of seeking in Indian spirituality was in the interior of the human mind and the tools of introspection necessarily the discerning faculties of the mind itself.